UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA MARIA

CENTRO DE ARTES E LETRAS

DEPARTAMENTO DE LETRAS ESTRANGEIRAS MODERNAS

LTE 1019 ELABORAÇÃO DE TRABALHO FINAL DE GRADUAÇÃO DE

LITERATURA E LÍNGUA INGLESA II

MUSIC AS TEACHING MATERIAL IN ENGLISH AS ADDITIONAL

LANGUAGE CLASSES

Aluna: Renata Ouriques de Oliveira

Orientadora: Patrícia Marcuzzo

Santa Maria, RS, Brasil

2017

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1. Introduction

Music is everywhere. It can be playing as background song when you go to a

nice restaurant or even on your way home, in the car or on the bus. Music is

something that helps in one’s welfare and emotions, bringing harmony to this

person’s life. Nowadays, we see this scenario even inside the classroom. Students use

their earplugs when having classes, one of the reasons being to “keep they focused”,

as a number of them have already reported to me. For this reason, I believe that

music can be part of the teaching process, serving as a tool to help in the learning of

an additional language (AL), since it is part of people’s lives and because AL classes

somehow should be connected to students’ real lives. According to Farias (2001 apud

SOUZA, 2012, p. 3)

A música como sempre, esteve presente na vida dos seres humanos, ela também sempre está presente na escola para dar vida ao ambiente escolar e favorecer a socialização dos alunos, além de despertar neles o senso de criação e recreação.

Based on this, exploring songs in a classroom may contribute to students’

interests and their meaningful learning of an AL, for example.

In order to establish a connection between music and students’ real lives,

teachers should be willing to work with technologies, or playful material, to make

students feel motivated and relate, somehow, their daily lives to learning English as

an AL. However, there are several problems and difficulties teachers have to face in

Brazilian schools - such as overcrowded classrooms, lack of teaching materials, lack

of technological resources, and many others (BRITISH COUNCIL, 2015, p. 12) - to

implement these ideas in the real scenario. Besides that and, perhaps, due to this fact,

we have students demotivated to learn the English language, which can be so scary

for them.

In order to assist school teachers, PCNEM (National Curricular Parameters

for High School) were designed in Brazil in 1990’s. Its objective is to promote a

reworked educational practice, considering the reality of the country and students,

and serving as guidelines for schools and teachers, which/who should adapt them

according to the specificities of these schools and students. This is a meaningful

point to observe here, because it acknowledges difficulties to teach English as an AL

mainly in public schools in Brazil.

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According to PCNEM (2000, p. 13) the traditional model of teaching (for

example, content written on the board and students copying that) is no longer an

appropriate choice, considering the globalized context in which we live nowadays.

Therefore, students’ critical thinking and also ethical and intellectual development

are the aspects prioritized in high school.

(…) buscou-se construir novas alternativas de organização curricular para o

Ensino Médio comprometidas, de um lado, com o novo significado do

trabalho no contexto da globalização e, de outro, com o sujeito ativo, a

pessoa humana que se apropriará desses conhecimentos para se aprimorar,

como tal, no mundo do trabalho e na prática social. Há, portanto, necessidade

de se romper com modelos tradicionais, para que se alcancem os objetivos

propostos para o Ensino Médio (PCNEM, 2000, p. 13).

In this line of thought, the AL under discussion here (English) is seen as a way

of contributing to students’ communication and access to information worldwide

(PCNEM, 2000, p. 19). This perspective can be related to the use of information

technology, as a means of communication, when used in a group of activities, such as

playful activities (songs and games, for instance), being a strategy to insert technology

into the classroom.

In Orientações Curriculares para o Ensino Médio (OCEM), the proposals are

similar to PCNEM’s. The objectives of AL in OCEM (2006) are, among others, to

reaffirm the importance of the citizenship concept and discuss the practice of this

concept in Foreign Languages’ teaching; and to bring in the theories of language and

new technologies (literacy, multiliteracy, multimodality), giving suggestions to Foreign

Languages’ teaching practice through these technologies. Both documents acknowledge

students as participants of a modern world, in which they are able to communicate with

other cultures, developing a world perspective. However, people’s testimonials from

OCEM (2006) indicate unequal results from the English language taught in schools and

in language institutes. This aspect results in dissatisfaction from students, who think

they cannot learn English in schools, as they show in this part:

(...) depreende-se que as falas dos alunos e dos pesquisadores defendem que

o aprendizado de uma língua estrangeira se concretiza em cursos de idiomas,

levando-nos a inferir que não há essa expectativa quanto à escola regular

(OCEM, 2006, p. 89).

Participating in both scenarios (being an intern in a public school and working in

a private institute), I can say that this is what really happens, but it is even worse. The

public schools’ students, most of the time, cannot measure their progress, i.e. they do

not realize how much they know and understand, and sometimes because of that they do

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not have the will to learn. The students in the private institute are more willing to pay

attention and to learn, due to several reasons (e.g. pleasant environment, good

infrastructure) that are different from the public schools’ students, motives that are not

going to be discussed in this study. This is my reason of choosing to work with playful

activities (songs) and of trying to make it more pleasant to the public schools’ students.

Therefore, believing that music plays an important part on people’s lives, I decided to

analyze its relevance on the process of learning English and how helpful it can be to the

development of the four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.

The aim of this study is to analyze worksheets with different songs, which

intend to be worked as a classroom-ready lesson plan, published in the Internet portal

called Busy Teacher, serving as a resource for teachers to draw upon it in their English

classes. I intend to analyze each worksheet and suggest a change, in order to readapt,

joining the most relevant and interesting activities for teachers to work in class.

2. Methodology

2.1 Corpus

The corpus of my analysis consists of ten song worksheets, retrieved from the

website Busy Teacher (http://busyteacher.org/), on September 12th of 2016.

To start the analysis, I selected ten songs and one worksheet for each song,

considering relevant ones, i.e., worksheets with more than one activity in which the

teachers could explore working with vocabulary, context of the song, and so on, and

not so relevant ones, which I found a bit incomplete to work in class (with only one

activity or with one that repeats, for instance). The criterion to select the level of the

worksheets, at first, was the level of the students I was working with in my current

job, which was the intermediate level. Afterwards, I connected this choice with my

other students (from the public school), due to my internship project. The selection of

the song worksheets was made by personal choice. The first step was to establish

songs I was aware were being played in several places that time and also that were

old, but of students’ interest, and which I believe were well known around the world.

The second step was to choose significant worksheets, with relevant activities, in

which I could manage to work in an one-hour class, and that could cover the four

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skills. Besides looking for relevant worksheets, the third step was to choose

worksheets lacking in one or more skill(s) and that were not so adequate to work in

class due to its ordinary activities, for example. The general principle that guided the

choice of the songs was if the song/band was well-known (acknowledging their

success), also thinking about the students’ context, that means, the songs they asked

me to play in class/told me they enjoyed; songs I presumed they would be interested

in listening to. In order to identify the worksheets, they received a code (WS1 –

WS10), following the alphabetical order of the song’s title, as presented on Chart 1.

Chart 1- Worksheets

Worksheet code Song Singer/ Band

WS1 Blank Space Taylor Swift

WS2 Hello Adele

WS3 Hotel California Eagles

WS4 Locked Away R. City feat Adam Levine

WS5 Love Yourself Justin Bieber

WS6 Marvin Gaye Charlie Puth feat Megan Trainor

WS7 Perfect Pink!

WS8 See you again Wiz Khalifa feat Charlie Puth

WS9 Sugar Maroon 5

WS10 7 years Lukas Graham

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2.2 Procedures of analysis

In order to carry out this analysis, I adopted four steps. The first one was to

consider the worksheets in terms of what was repeated and what was different between

the activities each of them presents. The second step was to identify the structure, i.e.,

if there was a pattern or not among the activities. The third step considered was to

analyze if the activities embrace the four skills of English (listening, speaking, reading

and writing). The fourth step of the analysis was to consider the worksheets that were

more guided for the teacher and for the students, in terms of having activities covering

the maximum of comprehension, not only working with the lyrics, but also exploring

pre-reading, context of the song/band, and so forth.

3. Results

This section is divided into four sub-sections: 1) the contextual analysis; 2)

what the worksheets have in common (in terms of activities and skills required); 3)

the structure of the worksheets; and 4) textual analysis.

3.1 Contextual analysis

The website Busy Teacher (http://busyteacher.org/) was chosen due to its

significant amount of classroom materials related to music, grammar, academic articles

and so on. This internet portal was designed with the purpose to help busy teachers

out, as its name suggests. Busy Teacher is a website that provides free online resources

for English teachers who do not have either much time or creativity to design extra

material for their classes and it was launched aiming to fill a gap in the educational

marketplace, as the founder, Andrei Zakhareuski, states on the website. Moreover, he

states that it is in its ninth year of operations as a trusted web presence for teacher

worldwide. From several teachers’ testimonials, I collected relevant pieces of

information, in which I can support my selection criterion. The teachers, in general,

state that it is a website which saves time and makes teaching even more fun; it is a

good website to look for resources because it is refreshing and updated; it is great for

reviewing and introducing grammar points; it is inspirational and practical; and so on.

The teachers who access Busy Teacher can find extra material for vocabulary, reading,

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listening, grammar, pronunciation practices, and so forth, as well as articles, posters,

small texts, song worksheets and many more, to be used in class.

3.2 Similarities between the worksheets

3.2.1 Activities’ similarities

The worksheets are presented with the song and activities to be worked on.

Each of the worksheets has two or more tasks to be performed except for one (WS4)

that showed only one task. The first observation was that “Fill in the gaps” is a

recurrent activity and it is repeated in all of the ten worksheets (See Figure 1 below).

Figure 1 – WS6

Out of ten, six worksheets presented the “Put the lines in order” activity and

three of them have three tasks in common: 1) Circle the correct word; 2) Answer the

questions in relation to the song; and 3) Match the halves (refer to Figure 2).

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Figure 2 – WS10, WS2 WS1 (respectively)

3.2.2 Language skills required

The first aspect observed in the worksheets was if each activity covered the

four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. The common ground between all

the worksheets is the reading, the writing and the listening skill. The reading is

needed due to the fact that this skill is required in any textual activity. The students

would have the paper printed to work on and the lyrics to read the song and the

activities, even though it was not asked a rather complex activity, for instance, a

reading activity per se. The writing skill is necessary because the students have to fill

in the gaps, but what happens again is that they do not have anything complex to do:

they only have to complete the gaps with words they hear or words they have in a

box. More specifically, out of ten worksheets, four of them require construction of a

sentence (or an idea), as the activities present questions regarding the song’s

interpretation or grammar, in which the students have to really know how/what to

write and not just copy a word. Thus, there is no activity in which students have to

write a text or anything that requires a big effort from them in terms of writing.

The listening skill is also required in all of the ten worksheets, since to

complete the “Fill in the gaps” activity they have to listen to the songs. The last skill,

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speaking, is not specifically requested in any of the activities. There is no suggestion

for the teacher to make students sing the song or make a conversation using

structures found in the activity, for instance.

3.3 Structure of the activities

There is not a common order of the worksheets’ activities. Out of ten, seven

worksheets start with the listening part, whether they have an activity to fill in the

gaps or to put the lines in order, as the example below (Figure 3).

Figure 3 – WS7

Two worksheets, out of ten, start with an activity of discussion: discussion of

the context of the band/singer. One of them, WS5, has a text to read and the

following activity would be to complete with the requested information. The other

worksheet, WS9, does not have a contextualization to discuss the questions (see

Figure 4 below).

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Figure 4 – WS9

The students do not have a warm-up activity to discuss the questions. They

should have a previous knowledge of the band and the songs in order to do that. If

they do not know the band, the purpose of the activity is lost.

3.4 Textual analysis

3.4.1 Well-conducted worksheets

In order to readapt one worksheet, WS9 was identified as the most guided

one, together with WS5, serving as basis to conduct my analysis and, therefore, my

idea of readjustment. There are significant points in these two worksheets that can be

worked on in class, giving the opportunity for the students to create answers, not

only copying words. The first important observation is that there are visual elements

in the beginning of the activity (WS9), in which students have to match with the

words (words they probably do not know and are not very usual) they have below

them, as showed in the following example (Figure 5).

Figure 5 – WS9

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Visual elements are an effective and positive way to replace a word or

expression, because they make students reason, stepping aside of a possible translation

from the teacher, which, in most of the cases, is not the objective of the class. After

this activity, there is a contextualization of the band. The students need to answer if

they like that band, what kind of music they play, what their songs are mostly about,

etc, and this is another significant step because the students are not going to “jump”

directly into the song; they will have to discuss about the band and the kind of music

first. The next step is to listen to the song and fill in the blanks with the words missing.

In the case of this worksheet, they have to pay attention to the song, but they receive

the words written to copy in the spaces provided. If they did not receive them, it could

be a good point for the students to practice the listening skill and to struggle to

understand the words, but also a bad point if the students did not have the reasonable

knowledge to understand the lyrics and feel lost in this part of the activity. The

following activity is an interpretation of the song. After they listen to the song, they

have a controlled practice, to understand the meaning of some of its parts, and there are

again visual elements for that, as showed in Figure 6.

Figure 6 – WS9

The last activity in the worksheet is about grammar. In this part, students are

asked what the verb “killing” is referring to, and also what the verb tense is, if they can

find another example in the text and how this verb is formed. Finishing that, students

are guided to a grammar activity, outside the context of the song, in which they have to

answer questions only about the verb tense proposed in the task.

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The beginning of WS5 is a reading activity, which is also important. Students

have to answer the questions according to the life of the singer, and, for this, they have

to interpret the biography given. The questions are straightforward, but the answers are

not ready for them to copy. They have to complete the sentences only with words, but

sometimes they have to change the words or the sentence to fill in the blanks (for

instance “Canadian” to “Canada”, in letter “a” – refer to Figure 7).

Figure 7 – WS5

The last activity that I found very relevant, before “writing the missing word”,

was to match the expressions in the song to the sentences, what would help them to

understand better the meaning of each sentence (refer to Figure 8 below).

Figure 8 – WS5

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3.4.2 Less instructed worksheets

There were worksheets I did not find significant for using in class or perhaps a

little difficult for the students to understand what they would have to do and

complicated to answer by themselves. The first worksheet analyzed in these aspects

was WS6, in which the students have to listen to the song and repeat three kinds of

tasks: 1) Fill in the gaps; 2) Put the sentences in the right order; and 3) Match the two

halves. Besides being repetitive, as soon as they finish the first three activities, they

practically have the answers for the other ones, since parts of songs usually repeat.

There were few activities in two of the analyzed worksheets, WS4 and WS1. In

WS4, students are supposed to fill in the gaps with the information provided in the

box, only to review the second conditional as it suggests, and in WS1 they only have

to complete the song with the words provided, order the lines and match the halves.

This worksheet, though, has a different task, one that I considered difficult: students

need to correct the mistakes in each sentence of the song’s first verse. My question is

if they are able to only listen and correct these mistakes right away. In WS2, the

lyrics are there with gaps to be completed and the questions that follow this task are

very complex, so it could also be difficult. The students should answer what the song

is about and there is nothing before that to contextualize the activity. After this, there

is a personal question and another one concerning the theme of the song. I believe it

would be hard for them to answer it, because it assumes students will understand all

the lyrics, and also there is no activity for them to reflect on that previously (see

Figure 9, numbers 1 and 2 below).

Figure 9 – WS2

Besides theses aspects, in activity WS5 (refer to Figure 7on the previous page)

students do not have the information to answer letter “d”. Below this activity, there are

song facts and the only thing informed is that this song is about an ex-girlfriend, but

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her name is not given at any time, so not all of the students would be capable of

answering it. Another different task from WS9 is to find in the song the contractions of

the words they have written in the activity (because as ‘cause, for instance). It is

important for them to know that most of the times we have informal speech in the

songs, so there are contractions of words and even mistakes in the structure or in the

grammar. This is another point they mention in this worksheet. The next activity is for

them to find a grammatically incorrect sentence in the song and correct it. In this case,

they would have to read, think and understand in order to do so. This way, the

suggestion is either consider readapting one of the worksheets or design the teacher’s

own worksheet with the ideas presented in each one here, having in mind the level of

students being taught.

In accordance with PCNEM (2000, p. 12), there is a necessity to express

contemporaneity and to invest in the teacher training, since the suggested measures

demand changes in the selection of contents and incorporation of modern technological

devices, for instance informatics. There are two perspectives I can follow when talking

about the worksheets presented in this study. The first perspective is showing that

teachers must be able to work with informatics, searching for the appropriate

worksheets on the internet, and considering that these are authentic texts (lyrics of

songs), something seen as positive, based on the OCEM. The students do not need to

be in contact with technology to perform the activities, but they are not working with a

textbook, as traditionally presented. Students can work with songs, which is a creative

means of propagating the AL, also having to understand and discuss the context of the

songs, in some of the presented worksheets. The second perspective is that the

worksheets, in a broader sense, are not technological. The kind of activities the

students have to perform does not put them out of their comfort zone, in which they

could explore computers, cell phones or tablets. There are also many activities in

common between the worksheets in which they have to fill in the blanks with the song

lyrics, and this is something teachers of AL have done for a long time.

One aspect in the analyzed worksheets differs from the idea presented in

OCEM (2006, p. 122) of having in mind working with a contemporary epistemology,

for students not to have fragmented knowledge, whereby teachers would explain

grammar activities and isolated linguistic items. Only in few worksheets (3 out of 10),

there are questions to contextualize about the song or the band/singer. The majority of

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them present “filling in the blanks” or “put the sentences in the correct order” activities

and they are the opposite of what is suggested in OCEM. Filling in the blanks with a

word does not require a lot from the students. Another suggestion that appears in

OCEM, when talking about writing practice, does not appear in the worksheets, which

is for students to be encouraged to produce a text recreating the story expressed in a

song lyric, consequently practicing and improving their writing skills.

Unquestionably, the website Busy Teacher has many resources for English

teachers. However, the worksheets are not technological and modern themselves. At

least the ones designed with song lyrics, which were analyzed in this study.

Furthermore, the worksheets are in the portal for any teacher to access, even the

Brazilian ones who work in public schools, but they do not actually designed for

Brazilian students. In reality, we do not have high school students with the appropriate

level of English to work with these worksheets. The majority of the students in public

schools seem to me not having the desire to learn the English language; they

sometimes feel demotivated due to several reasons that, again, is not the focus of this

study; they say they do not know and frequently refuse to speak in class, among other

examples; therefore, we do not have the perfect scenario to work with this language. In

summary, the worksheets are quite difficult and might not work, at least for the

students that I am in contact with at this moment.

Conclusion

The website Busy Teacher brings many extra activities, as well as useful

material. There are thousands of printable worksheets and lesson plans for teachers to

download and use them in their class. The songs chosen seem to be adequate; however,

the worksheets look as if they were easy and simple to teach an additional language. In

relation to the worksheets I have selected, the activities are less guided and less

contextualized, in general, to Brazilian students, often assuming a previous knowledge

from them. Finally, another aspect that conflicts with what is written in PCNEM’s and

OCEM’s is that the worksheets are not based in an extensive use of technology; they

are used in an ordinary and traditional way.

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